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Sometimes Brad and I are awesome parents.  Brad would say that he is always awesome.  Here is his criteria:  1)  Am I still here?  I am awesome.

In particular, we have achieved a (hopefully) habit-forming awesomeness in the form of Family Art Night.  Back in August Brad and I lamented that neither of us had time to work on our personal art in any meaningful way.  I worried that Zephyr’s drawing skills were somewhat lacking.  Both us noted that Francis was DESPERATELY needy regarding art time.  She wanted MORE.  MORE.  MORE.  “Can you help me make a quilt?  Can you help me create a paper tower that is strong enough to let chickens play on it?  Can you help me make a felt sleeping bag for Nutty the Squirrel?  Can you help me make a hat out of clay?  Can you help me make a robot that actually moves out of plastic milk jugs?  Can you help me weld a STEEL PLAYGROUND FOR MY NEWT?”

What we couldn’t figure out was how to guide the kids without Family Art Night becoming completely subsumed by their wishes, because although we love our kids, part of the goal was that we might also pursue our own interests—-but together.  And I am not one of those people who wants to sacrifice my interests on the alter of my children.  I proposed taking turns guiding their projects.  Brad had some idea about making them leave us alone that wouldn’t work.  We argued and gave up.

But then we tried again with more reasonable expectations.  Yes, the kids need our time, but if our over-arching message is “I will get you going and then you need to do it yourself”, everyone can be happy.  They CAN do it themselves.  They love to make me their art servant, but they can be taught to be self-sufficient.  Hence, Family Art Night sits on Monday evenings.  We have dinner early and then rush down to the basement where we get going on our own projects.  It requires that I plan ahead a bit and have standby ideas and supplies to get them going, but that isn’t an unpleasant task.

Last week Francis felted a mini Totoro, and Zephyr made a beaded necklace.  When they finished those projects, both kids painted with water colors.

I planned a sewing project and knitted on a hat for a friend.  Brad worked on stained glass designs with us and then retired to the computer for more design time.

Inez is the only one who misses out on Family Art Night.  She goes to bed early.

3 Comments | In: Awesome!, family, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers | | #

I finally got my diagnosis for what has been troubling my neck and shoulders, and although it isn’t really funny nor particularly good news, for some reason, it makes me smile.  I saw the spinal specialist again last week after having more x-rays and an MRI done.  Yes, my spine has a reverse curve, and yes, there are a couple vertebrae that “move independently” (that’s bad I guess), but my largest problem is that I have arthritis running down my neck.  It is taking up space and shoving the vertebrae in my spine around a bit, and that is causing me pain.

My grandfather Si was a sweet man, sometimes funny, sometimes whiney, often charming.  As he got older, he often complained of his “arthur-itis”, which always sounded like a proliferance of Arthurs.  Those Arthurs really plagued him, and the family had many laughs about his pronunciation without ever correcting him.  Now arthur-itis plagues me and yet gives me a little giggle.  My grandpa’s goofiness has made something disappointing sweeter.  In short, it is a bummer, but I’m going to be okay.  I start physical therapy on Tuesday, so here is hoping I can kick Arthur in the….neck?

11 Comments | In: family, How strange | | #

I feel really lucky to live in Portland.  I guess if I was living in New York City, after awhile, I might learn how to escape the city.  And my short year that I lived in Toronto, Ontario, I definitely learned places to go to pretend I wasn’t really in an urban area.  I have thought a lot about the city versus country thing.  At heart, I think I am really a country person.  High school years withstanding, throughout my life, I’ve felt comfortable in the country.  I love the woods.  I love the quiet.  On the other hand, the city is full of fascinating people.  I feel part of society in the city—ironically I find I love people more in the city.  My memories of growing up in the country are of being happy on my own up on Rock Creek Road, but lonely and sad whenever I had to venture out to Willamina or Sheridan.  Maybe that just represents the angst of youth, feeling like you are just so weird that you can never quite belong, but I never learned how to feel okay in my country community.  On the other hand, I feel really comfortable in the city, but I get tired of the constant noise.  I don’t find peace as easily in the city.  The constant sound is so invasive.

It’s very important to me that my children learn how to feel at home in the woods because it has felt like such a grounding presence for me.  (I still need to read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods but I am afraid it will freak me out too much.)  Luckily it isn’t too hard to get out even in Portland.  Just a few miles from our house we have access to hundreds of miles of trails and semi-wilderness.  We went for a great hike a few weekends ago on one of the Fire Lane Trails.

These trails are nearly deserted this far out of town.  We passed one woman with a dog during our two and half hour hike.

The kids liked being out under the trees watching maple leaves slowly spin to the ground.  Zephyr especially dug the pine cone fights.

So “one foot in/one foot out”.  I guess it is a balanced way to live….

No Comments | In: Environment, family | | #

I am officially a totally crazy mother.  I have begun to say the most bizarre things… and it is all my son’s fault.  I only have one son, and he is just four years old, but my, does he bring it out in me!

The top seven crazy things that I have actually said to my son in the last month:

7)  You must, must, must learn to wipe your own ass, sweetie.

6)  Take that toilet plunger out of your mouth!

5)  Why are there barbecue tongs in your bed?

4)  Do not scrub the sand out of your butt with your toothbrush!

3)  Don’t chop that tree with a hammer; get an ax!

2)  I don’t want to ever, ever see you putting gravel in your foreskin again!

And the top quote, which I swear I have said multiple times this month to both my older kids:

1)  ”Take your feet OUT of your sister’s mouth—NOW!”

Trouble

3 Comments | In: family, How strange | | #

I like the phrase “dog days of summer”.  I realize that it is talking about the dog star being visible in the night sky and has little to do with actual dogs, but it still makes me think of dogs, lying under a tree in the shade panting.  It makes me think of my childhood and this obnoxious but lovable dog we had named Bilbo.

We have chicken days of summer around here.  I tired of stinky chicks in the house after a whole week.  That might be a world record actually.  The baby girls were banished to the henhouse last night.  I felt pretty proud of myself in this respect.  I rigged up a nice little place where the chicks can “hang with the big girls” without being pecked or smashed to death by the big girls.  You have to introduce any new members to the flock with care and consideration; that goes double for the little ones.  I had read enough horror stories on on-line chicken blogs, (yes, it is not just me), about baby chicks being killed by adult hens.  Other blogs suggested that new members could be introduced by the “seen but not touched” method.  Usually this would be by putting the new birds in caged off area where the established hens can get used to seeing the new birds for a while.  I think I may have accomplished this with the chicks by fencing them in above the nesting boxes in my storage place.

The babies still need warmth at night, so I ran a light out to the henhouse using my NEW outdoor plug.  I know that most people probably have one at their house and TAKE IT FOR GRANTED, but I do not.  We have not had anywhere to plug anything in to for the last 5 years.  Finally with the bathroom remodel I had them stick a plug through to the outside and now I have all this freedom to plug shit in!  How should I waste electricity first?  The possibilities are endless!  (I am thinking bouncy house!)

Unfortunately this is going to be a source of worry for me.  I wish I weren’t like this, but I imagine it will be a few nights before I can sleep without worrying about burning the henhouse down.  When I first got a running fountain outside I worried about raccoons getting in it for two nights.  What would they do there and why did that matter?  I don’t know, but I worried about it.

Besides chicken matters, little is going on these days.  After a summer jam-packed with fun and running around, my children seem to want to go nowhere and do nothing.  For the second day in a row I offered fun options, including requisite bribery.  They didn’t take it…. even for a pastry at the Italian bakery, even for a trip to the fountain downtown, even for a stop at the library.  What do they want to do?  Stay home.  Play with legos.  Dress up their animals (and sister) and pretend they are going to a wedding.

I’ve been vaguely frustrated with this because I am go-go-go!  I want to get out to Ikea and buy a new bookshelf for Francis’ room, hop down to Powell’s and pick up Suzanne Collin’s Mockingjay, (can’t wait to read that one!), get the right sized screws to finish mounting hardware in the bathroom, and we are all out of milk so we need to grocery shop.

But I am trying to go with the flow, and the flow seems to be a trickle, so I need to be hip to that.  I am trying to not push it so much, stay quiet and enjoy this lovely time of peaceful play.

2 Comments | In: Chickens Are Super Fabulous, Current musings, family, My super freakin' cute kids | | #

It’s good to remember that for as many times as everything goes wrong and the day is a total mess, sometimes everything goes wrong and the world is unperturbedly perfect.

We decided to go berry picking on Sunday.  I had been out there earlier in the week and had affirmed that there were still berries to be found.  I was sure that there would be even more by the weekend as all the red marionberries would have ripened up.  Wrong.  We got out there and the fields were picked clean.  I had never really contemplated the phrase “slim pickings”, but that is what we found row after row after row.

You had to keep moving to find the smallest marionberry.  You also had to look all the difficult places—underneath, behind big thorns, down low on the ground.  In short, it sucked.

But still it was beautiful.  The farm was empty.  The island (Sauvie) was quiet.  The sun was preparing to tip over the edge of the earth, the birds were swooping through the air, and there was a sweet and light breeze making everything young and fresh.  Not many berries, but it sure was great being out there.

The kids got tired of picking fairly quickly so I sent them off down a row to a field beyond.  Inez toddled after them for all she was worth.  They found a barkdust pile and some ripe blueberries and were happy.  Brad and I could pick and chat quietly and we were happy.

This is of course when disaster struck.  Now that I think about it, it looks like the first stages of disaster are captured in this photo!  Inez decided to take off her diaper which was dirty.  Not being able to remove her overalls properly in order to escape the diaper, she manages to wrap clothing and diaper and sandal up in a horrible net of shit.  And then she stepped in it.  It is what our family likes to call a “shitastrophe”.  The older kids started screaming.  I come running (although slowly, I admit).  We didn’t bring any diapers with us as we like to live on the edge.

I try to extract the child from her excrement and then try to wash her up by dumping full water bottles over her backside.  Unfortunately for her they were ice water.  (That’ll teach her to excrete!).  I put her shirt back on her, wash up my hands over and over again, and get back to berry picking.  The kids amuse themselves throwing barkdust and flowers at us.  We tolerate it reasonably well.

After we quit tolerating it and both yell at them for throwing bark in the berries, they run off out of view to the next field and Brad and I consider chucking it in.  We have a pants-less baby, a nasty diaper, poor picking conditions, and questionably clean hands.  I call for the older kids.  No kids.  I call again.  Nope.  I decide that I need to go find them.  After wandering across a field of blueberries, I see a side field that looks promising.  Francis and Zephyr are standing in it, shoveling handfuls of thornless blackberries into their mouths.  The field is SO AMAZINGLY FULL OF BERRIES.  There are tons.  I send Francis back to fetch Brad and in the next 20 minutes we pick more than we had picked in the previous hour.  We fill bucket after bucket after bucket.  It is awesome.

Back at the farm stand, we pay for our berries, use soap and hot water on our hands, and improvise a diaper out of a sunhat and a clean onesie.  (Luckily we do find a clean diaper wrap in the car, and when you have one of those, you can shove just about anything in it and make it work.  Once at a movie, I removed my camisole from under my sweater and crammed that into a diaper wrap to get the kid through the next hour.)

Sometimes the world is great.  We’re dirty, we’re tired, but we have plenty berries, plenty joy.

9 Comments | In: family, food, My super freakin' cute kids | | #

My sister Anne and I share many interests; composting, growing things, running (sometimes), art and fabric, weird exhibitions of language and learning, and bitching about why people can’t get their shit together.  For me, perhaps one of the most fun and surprising of our shared interests is our enthusiasm for eating…. most anything.  My most recent trip to Kobe was a great opportunity to indulge our shared love of good and pretty simple food.

When I first met up with Anne right off the plane, she had a long list of “things we would eat”.  Whereas many travelers might arrange their week around things to see, our week was shaping up to incorporate “the best sushi in this little shop”, “okonomiyaki that this old woman makes near my house”, and food on sticks in China town and at a little alley yakatori.

First stop after dropping off my wet luggage at her place was okonomiyaki, a fried pancake of egg & vegetables topped with sauciness.  I think they usually have meat in them, but Anne has hers “like the monks”, which essentially means vegetarian.  It was full of those long stringy mushrooms which I think would have been better if they were of a larger, less ropey variety.  Anne eschews meat, but admits she is a sucker for mayonnaise, an ingredient I have something of a weakness for to.  The whole thing was great!  The shop that she took me to was charming—an old woman worked over a grill in front of us so we were able to watch her creation while drinking super cold beers.  Anne kept up a comfortable banter in Japanese with the owners and I felt like a bit of a superstar to get to be eating okonomiyaki in a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Japan.

4 Comments | In: family, food, on the road again | | #

Actually I don’t always feel that way and neither do my kids, but today it is all stars for me.  We are taking off on our annual trip to Ashland to “get culture”, and I figured that as I hate driving anyway, how about taking the train the first leg to Eugene and letting Brad schlep his way down the freeway in the car tomorrow after work?  Viola!  Kids are beside themselves with happiness.  Now all I have to do is get ready for a big trip a day earlier, but hey— I also get to get out of here a day earlier!  And I figure this might be a bit like wedding planning—-if you give yourselves 2 years for planning, you are seriously going to RUIN that 2 years.  Better to get it all over with.

So off we go to Ashland via Amtrak Cascades.  We’re pulling into Eugene and my sister’s house at about 9 pm tonight.  If I am really organized, the kids will have a nutritious picnic dinner on the train.  If I am not, $6 corndogs in the dining car everyone!  Either way, I am about breaking my arm patting myself on the back.

Have a great week!  I’ll be back next Monday or so with all new tales to tell (and a wrap up on Japan—-sorry!).

4 Comments | In: family, My super freakin' cute kids, on the road again, The Arts | | #

On the Shin Kobe Ropeway

You know how sometimes you have to ditch the husband and kids and just take off for foreign countries?  Well, that is how awesome I am.

I’m in Kobe Japan with my sister Anne… I traveled all by myself and it is awesome.  Anne has been here for a year and a half and I knew I needed to get over to see her life while she was still living it in this locale.  This was the right time to go, while the kids didn’t have much going on and could safely be sequestered at their grandparents’ houses (Thanks Mom and Dad & Dennis and Sue!).  I have had some pangs of guilt, but not many when I think of them having the time of their lives being all spoiled and entertained in the country.  Inez is probably being licked by a dog right now.  Scratch that.  It’s 1 am Oregon time, so that baby had better be sleeping!

Anyway, I don’t intend to be updating this blog much while I am here, but I did want to let people know where I am.  Eating awesome food!  Chatting non-stop with my little sister!  Going running with Kobe Hash Hound Harriers!  In Freakin’ Japan!

In the herb gardens at the top of the rope way

7 Comments | In: Awesome!, family, on the road again | | #

Okay, so this is Parmeter.net, so maybe it is a bit self-serving to devote a blog entry to this, but I do just need to tell you all about how talented my uncle is (and YOUR uncle is if I have an adequate grasp of the bulk of my readership).  Yes, Rick Parmeter is good at what he does, and as I live in a house that has millions of problems needing to be solved with finesse and cleverness, I am a big fan of a craftsman who can solve them.  He thinks through things in a very interesting way that manages to be thorough and yet fluid, practical and yet still creative.  He is picky with details and yet open to different ways to solve problems.  Here is the reading nook that he created under our stairs in the basement:

Where once there was chaos and cardboard boxes stacked in dusty piles, now there is something pretty…. with storage space!  Victory!  We spend a lot of time here now.

Another Uncle Rick creation is poised and ready to go.  The bathroom isn’t quite done yet, but the cabinets for it sit in the dining room, preparing themselves to launch into their new and long-lived service.  (They have sat in a corner of our dining room for over a year because we weren’t really ready to start the actual remodel.)  Will I miss them from that corner?  Not really.

Next up is the stairs to the basement.  Everything is so nice down there, but the entryway is not.  It hasn’t helped that we knew we would replace them and sort of purposely abused them.  (“Don’t bother putting down that paint drop cloth!”  ”Don’t worry about the stairs!  They can be ripped up!”).  They look really bad next to the daybed nook, but Rick is on it!  Here is a view I will not miss:

Can’t wait to show you what he’ll come up with!

6 Comments | In: Awesome!, family, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers | | #